No, I mean the ancestry graphic displayed in the PFC documentation, the one that summarize all the class hierarchy, with class type logo, big arrows, properties, and method, etc.

In fact, I would like to initiate the update of the PBPFC110.chm file into
PBPFC125.chm, including last changes in the frameworks.
I intend to use the HelpnDoc tool to do it, just to make it as easy as it could be.

Of course, I would like to keep the same format than the original documentation, so with this ancestry graphic.
The advantage of this graphic is that the programmer sees directly a complete overview of the class, but it's disadvantage is it seems very complex and time consuming to do it by hand...

So I was wondering if some kind of generator/tool could exists to produce this kind of graphic...

I don't know what tool is used for the graphics, but I'm on-board with trying to help by documenting the work I've done. I see the graphics you are talking about and updating those bitMaps without a tool to duplicate/modify them easily will make this a
difficult task. If a tool is not forthcoming, what would you suggest we do? Should we consider changing the format of the help?

I downloaded HelpnDoc and have it installed. I'm ready to help whenever you are ready to start.

Of course, the ideal would be to keep the same design as of the original PFC Documentation but we have various issues using HelpnDoc :

The Ancestry Graphic :
The ideal solution would be to develop our proper tool or to design some kind of template using Word/Visio or similar tools.
Otherwise, we could use the Browser's Document functionality (with some manual cleanup, it should be realizable to get something readable; but it is still an extra time consuming task ).

The Buttons Bar :
These buttons that appears at the top of every page of the original PFC Documentation, used to access easily extra informations like Ancestor, properties, methods and see also in a popup window, are not anymore working once imported into HelpnDoc. We can easily
override this by using simple link instead.

One alternative could be to choice another format that could be easily implemented using HelpnDoc. May be something like the one I used to document the
PFC JSON PARSER, but honestly it is not so sexy... so if you have some ideas, let us knows !

Regards,

2015-01-07 12:09 GMT+01:00 cjharris02892 <[email removed]>:

From: cjharris02892

I don't know what tool is used for the graphics, but I'm on-board with trying to help by documenting the work I've done. I see the graphics you are talking about and updating those bitMaps without a tool to duplicate/modify them easily will make this a
difficult task. If a tool is not forthcoming, what would you suggest we do? Should we consider changing the format of the help?

I downloaded HelpnDoc and have it installed. I'm ready to help whenever you are ready to start.

I have continued to think about the way we could maintain the PFC Documentation... and here are the results :

Ancestry Graphic :
I have made some research on the net to find a tool or something that can help us, but I have found nothing !
So I will begin to create a dedicated tool, in PowerBuilder (of course), that will be able to generate a complete Ancestry Graphic simply by selecting the class to be documented.
In the meantime, we need an interim solution and I have built up a
yED Graphic Editor dedicated palette called "PFC Ancestry" (see attached file, the link point to the download page of this free MS Visio Like tool).
That way, it will be easier to build manually an Ancestry Graphic using the dedicated palette, and then export the result into a image file using the export document functionality.
To import the palette go to Edit|Manage Palette... then click on the IMPORT SECTION button and finally select the 'PF Ancestry.graphml' files in the directory where it was downloaded.

The Buttons Bar :
As said before, each button will be replaced by a simple link. There is only one exception for the 'See Also" one that will be replaced by a corresponding section that will be inserted between "Object Relationship" and "Usage" sections.